“Yeah.”
“Every time I open the freezer, it spits ice cubes at me.”
Bobby let out a slow breath.
“Well,” I said, “notthistime.Obviously.”
“I’m going to lock up my gun.”
“Bobby, I’m not joking.I think it—” I eyed the ice maker and lowered my voice.“I think itknows.”
“Okay,” Bobby said.“I’m definitely going to lock up my gun.”
Shutting the freezer door, I said, “I’m telling you: that ice maker is possessed.”
“It’s not possessed, Dash.Just like the TV wasn’t possessed last week after Fox changed the password on their Disney Plus account.”
“That was a misunderstanding,” I said.“This is the real deal.”
“You’ve been reading way too much Stephen King,” Bobby said.“You told me the Pilot was possessed because it ran out of gas so fast.”
“Itdidrun out of gas suspiciously quickly!”
“You kept driving to Portland for mochi!”With what must have taken an effort, Bobby smoothed out his voice.“You can’t keep saying anything you don’t like is possessed.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.“That sounds like something someone would say if they were possessed.”
Before Bobby could—or had to—respond to that, Keme came into the kitchen.
“How was school?”I asked.(Because he hates it when I ask.)
Keme made a face and pretended to lunge at me.
I knew it was pretend, so I pretended to dart backward.And then Bobby had to pretend to catch me.
“How was the last day?”Bobby asked.“Everything go all right?”
Go all rightwas a code for asking: did you pass all your classes so you can graduate?It was August, and Keme had spent a miserable eight weeks in summer school, redoing (of all things) 9th-grade Language Arts and Pre-Algebra.(He’d taken those classes before The Last Picks made it their unofficial goal to help him graduate.)
“I passed,” Keme said.He dropped his backpack on the counter, fished out a folder, and said, “Do you have a box?”
“What kind of box?”I asked.
Did you know that sometimes, asking a teenager even the simplest of questions can confirm in their mind that you are a complete and total idiot?
“A box,” Keme said.
“How big?”Bobby asked.“What do you need to put in it?”
Keme tossed the folder on the counter and reached into his backpack again to take out his lunchbox.(It looked very manly and professional, and Millie got it for him, and from what I understand, adults with real jobs take their lunches to work all the time.But I liked to bring up the lunchbox in conversation as much as possible because a) it made Keme sound like a little kid, and therefore b) he went bonkers.) After the lunchbox came a pair of bent and battered spiral-bound notebooks, a handful of mechanical pencils, one really good pen he’d stolen from me, a rubber band, and more gum wrappers than I could count.
“Junk,” Keme said.
A piece of paper had slid out of the folder when it hit the counter.Fancy lettering and a flourish caught my eye.I opened the folder.
“Keme, this is your diploma.”
He was digging around in one of the backpack’s front pockets now, coming up with packets of hot sauce.
